The Increasingly Poor Decisions Of Megan McArdle

It's not easy being Megan McArdle. Despite the fact that she is the world's greatest pundit ever (just ask her!), it seems that enormous success, achieved entirely through hard work, dedication, innate superiority, courage and pluck, has its drawbacks. There are people out in the intertoobs, horrible people that do horrible things for utterly unknown reasons, things that harm wide-eyed and innocent pundits. For no reason!

When Someone Tells Lies About You on the Internet  

by Megan McArdle Jan 24, 2013 5:24 PM EST    

Don't assume it's true just because someone bothered to type it 

James Lasdun has an incredible piece on what it feels like to have someone making up crazy stories about you:

What follows is a longish quote from a very long article about a writer and teacher who was stalked by a crazed student whose advances he had rejected. Naturally McArdle is moved to link to this article, as she suffers herself from constant and unjust criticisms. For example, Ezra Klein bothered to type:

The argument you’d get for leaving prices in the hands of the private sector is that you get a much better product with much more innovation, much of it cost-saving. That’s clearly not happening in American health care, as America’s care is not, in general, measurably better than that of other nations. The more sophisticated argument you hear for why we need to spend so much more on health care is that by spending more, we’re subsidizing the medical innovation that makes other countries’ systems so good. That’s a more interesting (though unproven) argument, but I doubt that Americans would be happy to hear that the reason our health care costs so much, and needs to continue costing so much, is that we have a duty to subsidize the French.

 McArdle never did answer that question.

Perhaps McArdle is peeved about something Noah Smith typed:

Megan McArdle has committed three large mistakes when discussing health spending and the national debt. These mistakes are: 1. She does not label Medicare as "healthcare" spending. 2. She uses data on cost growth rates to try to rebut a point about cost levels. 3. She uses only current spending figures, when everyone agrees that the health care deficit problem is going to really bite starting a few years from now. Bloggers and opinion writers, please take note: If you want to make the case that America's government is spending too much on non-health items, you're going to have to make a better case than this.

Or Jonathan Chait:

Unless I am missing a very subtle parody of libertarianism, McArdle’s plan to teach children to launch banzai charges against mass murderers is the single worst solution to any problem I have ever seen offered in a major publication. Newsweek, I award this essay no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

 

But we have no way of knowing who Megan McArdle is talking about, or what they actually said. All we know is that McArdle says people are telling lies about her people. On the internet.

"Where there's smoke, there must be fire" is pernicious balderdash, especially in the age of the internet, when the only barrier to the number of crazy lies you can tell is the speed at which you can type. And yet, we are all seduced by the feeling that if someone bothered to write it down, it must be true. Why would they bother, otherwise?

 Exactly! I have often wondered why so many people believe whatever McArdle writes, just because she typed it out.  I guess this explains that phenomenon.

But of course there are crazy, or merely vicious and revenge-bent, people who do stuff like this all the time. Which we should remember every time we read an indignant diatribe against someone we don't know, by someone we don't know. Yes, it would be insane to make this sort of thing up. But there are a lot of insane people on the web.

 It certainly is nice of McArdle to warn us about all the vicious people on the internet. Especially since she obviously is not a victim of this phenomenon; she does not mention one single critic of her own, does not claim that anyone is telling lies about her, and does not mention a single, solitary lie being told about her. But people tell lies on the internet, so watch out!

It seems that someone on the internet is concerned about someone's reputation, perhaps because someone is realizing that she might be looking for work in the near future, now that someone's employment is not quite as prestigious or secure as someone thought it would be. And certain someones have lately acquired a slightly damaged reputation, which is what happens when someone decides to tell children to rush gunmen firing semi-automatic weapon. Or lie about statistics. Or support rampant polluters. Or reject equal rights for gays. Or support the gutting of the middle class and enrichment of the obscenely wealth.

For example.

Countdown To Doom: Zero Hour

It's here! Lord have mercy, Part II of the famed Elizabeth Warren slam down has arrived at last!. After a wait of only, let's see, 898 days, give or take, Megan McArdle has delivered unto us her mighty tome, as related below on July 26, 2010:

As I’m going to write in the next few days, the thing I don’t like about Warren is that she’s sloppy with data, and also that her mistrust manifests itself in paternalism. It’s one thing to think consumers would be better off without certain kinds of credit; it’s another thing to be positively certain that you’ll be making them better off by making such credit unprofitable.

In The Four Most Important Things You Need to Know About the New Mortgage Rules, McArdle discusses the dread pirate Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, an entity that Megan McArdle fought valiantly to vanquish. She declared that we didn't need financial transparency because we would never be able to understand financial documents anyway and that regulations can backfire; for instance, if you regulate payday loans, the poor might be forced to go to a loan shark instead.  As McArdle said in What Good Will The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Do?:

The problem isn't that banks don't have the right disclosure form for high-annual fee credit cards; it's that people don't want them. Maybe they shouldn't want them. Maybe we should only get the things that Elizabeth Warren wants to give us. But now we're not talking about transparency. We're talking about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau "protecting" you right out of financial products that the paternalistic technocrats don't think will be good for you. And that's problematic, both because it assumes that people are kind of like children, and because that protection often carries a high price. Usury Laws used to "protect" poor people from very expensive loans; they are often spoken of fondly by consumer advocates ruminating about payday lenders. The laws protected them so well that many of them couldn't get loans at all, and had to pawn their stuff, borrow from friends and family, or hit up a loan shark.

You thought I was kidding about the loan shark, didn't you?

Also paternalistic is regulating sub-prime mortgages.

[W]e frequently hear that there's too much information, now, and we need to simplify: better transparency, instead of just more. But long before the crisis we required simplified disclosures for both mortgages and credit cards; you got a sheet saying what your annual rate was, the minimum monthly payment, etc. Where the loan was adjustable, people had to be told that their rate could adjust. They didn't read it. Or they didn't understand it. Or they figured they'd pay of the car or refinance the house long before that happened.

The people who took out sub-prime mortgages were just stupid and lazy. There was no fraud; no no-doc loans or liar loans or robo-signing or corrupt rating agencies or criminal banks. Just a bunch of greedy homeowners who got what they deserved. Remember; the financial industry and its billionaires and CEOs, did nothing wrong. Why would they need more regulation?

There are two basic narratives of what happened. The first is that bankers had bad incentives: they took massive risks because the profits were so good in the up years that it was worth the risk of the bad, or because they could pass the risks onto some other sucker, or they thought Uncle Sugar would bail them out. The other narrative is that bankers had bad information: they didn't understand the risks they were taking.  

I've always preferred narrative B, because Narrative A doesn't make much sense. The CEOs of big banks lost vast sums of money, and their jobs, most of their social status, and so forth. They held onto the worst tranches of their securities, which implies they didn't know how badly they were going to blow up. Etc.  

I find it vastly more plausible, if not so comforting, to believe that systems can occasionally produce bad results even if the incentives basically point in the right direction. The FICO score revolution was valuable, but we took it too far. The money sloshing around US markets disguised the problems, because people who got into trouble tapped their home equity, or in a pinch, sold the house at a tidy profit. Everyone from borrowers to regulators was getting the same bad signal, that their behavior was much less risky than it actually was.

Having conclusively proven that the financial industry was just an innocent bystander in events that increased their wealth tremendously, McArdle concluded that a consumer financial protection agency would be useless.

It seems to me that the most likely outcome is a fairly useless agency that spends a lot of time playing with disclosure documents, and occasionally yells at banks about penalty fees, maybe requires banks to offer these plain vanilla loans of which Warren is so fond . . . but shies away from doing anything which will actually restrict credit availability. This agency won't do much harm, but of course, it's hard to see how it could do much good, either.

However, when McArdle wanted to warn us about the dangers of Elizabeth Warren, the consumer financial protection agency suddenly became much more dangerous.

.[..] I think it matters on two levels.  One, it matters how we evaluate [Warren's] work--and I've been disappointed at how uncritically some people I really respect have been willing to accept the 2001 and 2007 [medical bankruptcy] findings....  

It matters that we get this stuff right. I am among the majority who would like to see bankruptcies reduced in this country, and we're not going to be very effective at that if we run around thinking we can cure 2/3 of them by putting a national health care system in place, when in reality a third or less have any strong causal relationship with medical bills. Obviously, this was also held out as an argument for PPACA, making an implicit promise to the American people which I believe to be false.   

But it also matters because a large part of Warren's prominence comes from the fact that she's an academic. If she came from . . . well, the sort of think tank that publishes this sort of advocacy science . . . she would have considerably less glamor, and power.  

And perhaps it mattes most of all because this woman is now under consideration to head a powerful new agency. If this is how she evaluates data, then isn't that going to hamper her in making good policy? If we're going to have a consumer financial protection agency, I want one that has a keen eye to the empirical evidence on consumer welfare--not one that makes progressives most happy by reinforcing their prior beliefs.

And now that the Agency has issued the Ability to Repay rule, Megan McArdle helpfully explains how it will affect her readers. She does not explain much of the rule itself so let's go to the release from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

Today, we’re issuing one of our most important rules to date, the Ability-to-Repay rule. It’s designed to assure the reliability of mortgages – making sure that lenders offer mortgages that consumers can actually afford to pay back. This is a simple, obvious principle that needs to be cemented in the housing market.  

In the run-up to the financial crisis, we had a housing market that was reckless about lending money. Lenders thought they could make money on a loan even if the consumer could not pay back that loan, either by banking on rising housing prices or by off-loading the mortgage into the secondary market. This encouraged broad indifference to the ability of many consumers to repay loans, which dramatically increased mortgage delinquencies and rates of foreclosures ...  

The 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act created broad-based changes to how creditors make loans including new ability-to-repay standards, which we are charged with implementing. Among the features of our new Ability-to-Repay rule:

• Potential borrowers have to supply financial information, and lenders must verify it;
• To qualify for a particular loan, a consumer has to have sufficient assets or income to pay back the loan; and
• Lenders will have to determine the consumer’s ability to repay both the principal and the interest over the long term − not just during an introductory period when the rate may be lower.

Since McArdle wants to blame homeowners, not the mortgage industry, for the housing bubble and crash, one would think that she would be happy to see an end to  no-doc and liar loans. But McArdle is also ideologically opposed to any regulation that might affect her own interests or those of her tribe. The Koches did not pay McArdle to be anti-regulation, they paid for internships and seminars and think tanks and magazines to find people who were already anti-regulation, people who would be happy to fight any attempt to protect consumers if it might harm the profit margin of corporations.

People who pride themselves on their support for a corrupt and deadly system because it personally enriches them and feeds their starving ego.

But let's get back to McArdle.

Last week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released what it calls "one of our most important rules to date", the "Ability to Repay" criteria. Here's what you need to know:  

1.This will probably make it harder to get a mortgage, particularly if you are poorer  

Since that is the purpose of the rule, yes,  it will be harder to buy a house someone can't afford and will probably lose.

2. Nonetheless, it will not do that much to prevent default Arnold Kling, a former Freddie Mac economist who has long been my favorite source on housing finance, points out that debt-to-income ratios aren't a very good predictor of default risk.

As I point out in a new essay, mortgage defaults are driven largely by the borrower’s loss of equity. Thus, the most important risk factor at the time the loan is made is the size of the down payment. The rules ignore that. Instead, the focus in the borrower’s debt/income ratio, which is far and away the least predictive of the major factors used in predicting default (the down payment is most useful, followed by credit score and then by loan purpose, although the effects of these variables interact with one another so that it is not so easy to rank-order their importance).

Kling blames mortgages defaults on the government and feckless homeowners.

Defaults on appreciated homes almost never happen. Thus, in an environment of rising home prices, underwriting standards tend to become lax, and other risk-management measures tend to be loose. When house prices are rising, lenders are not punished for poor judgment, mistakes, or even for making loans based on fraudulent claims by borrowers regarding their income and financial situation. As long as house prices continue to rise, borrowers either keep up with their payments or sell their homes and use the proceeds to pay off their mortgages.

It is rising home prices that created lax standards, not lax standards that created a housing bubble to goose the economy. Kling:

Congress and regulators put pressure on financial institutions to broaden access to mortgage credit by lowering down-payment requirements. This allocated house price risk away from home buyers and toward financial institutions. Meanwhile, regulators approved maneuvers by financial institutions to minimize capital, notably through the creation of structured mortgage securities that earned high ratings from credit rating agencies. (See “Not What They Had in Mind: A History of Policies that Produced the Financial Crisis of 2008.”)   

Capital standards play a big role in determining the shape of the mortgage market. Financial institutions and mortgage financing mechanisms that are favored with low capital requirements are at a competitive advantage. Invariably, growth will take place where capital requirements are weakest.   

Mortgage capital requirements are very difficult to calibrate. If regulators make them too high, lenders will be driven out of the mortgage market and into other forms of lending, which may be even riskier. If regulators make capital requirements for mortgage lending too loose, they allow lenders to build up dangerous leverage, as happened in the years leading up to the financial crisis. It is my belief, based on what we saw take place in the recent decade, that it is impossible for regulators to allocate house price risk effectively to financial institutions. The only way to avoid a repeat of what we saw in 2008 is to make sure that home buyers take on some of this risk.

Don't regulate the financial industry, unload the risk on the homeowner. McArdle:

3.The government can continue writing mortgages under the old rules AEI's Ed Pinto notes that government entities like the Federal Housing Administration are grandfathered for up to seven years (or until they write their own final rules). So while it's probably going to get harder to obtain a new mortgage, it won't get much harder for quite some time. These days, federal government is effectively almost the whole market for mortgage originations. As long as they don't have to follow these new standards, borrowers with high debt-to-income ratios will still have options.

 

 The CFPB covers this as well.

In addition to the Ability-to-Repay rule, today we are also issuing a proposal for potential adjustments. There are two key parts to the proposal:

• First, a proposed exemption for designated non-profit creditors and homeownership stabilization programs, as well as certain Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Federal agency refinancing programs. These programs generally appear to be already subject to their own specialized underwriting criteria, and they are designed to help consumers refinance into a more affordable home loan.
• Second, a proposed a new category for certain loans made and held in portfolio by small creditors, such as small community banks and credit unions, called “Qualified Mortgages.”

Qualified Mortgages are a category of loans where borrowers would be the most protected. They, among other things, cannot have certain risky features like negative-amortization, where the amount owed actually increases for some period because the borrower does not even pay the interest and the unpaid interest gets added to the amount borrowed.

 

While it is possible that McArdle did not read the release she linked to, it is more probable, given her history of misleading, misunderstanding and obfuscating regarding Warren, that McArdle is very carefully giving the wrong impression by withholding part of the truth. She does not say that Fannie and Freddie don't have to follow rules, she says they do not have to follow that rule, which is correct.They must follow other rules. She thereby creates the impression that the CFPB's rules are typical governmental bureaucratic waste of time. This is why she gets the big bucks; her skill in using elision and misdirection make her a valuable asset to propagandists.

4. The new rules tell you a lot about how the CFPB thinks

 

Actually, they tell you a lot about how Megan McArdle thinks.

The new rules are part of the CFPB's drive to create "qualified" mortgages: low-risk, easy to understand products that will prevent consumers from getting themselves into trouble. Their mandate is not to protect banks (and savers) from default; it's to protect borrowers from themselves. That's why their approach is focused on the household income statement. I go along with the CFPB in saying that even if you aren't likely to default, you should not have a debt to income ratio that approaches 50%. It's bad for your financial health. Too much of your income is tied up in long-term fixed obligations which cannot be shed without major financial repercussions. That leaves you extremely vulnerable to any sort of financial shock: a job loss, a family member who needs expensive care, an emergency. People whose debt-to-income ratios are so high are almost certainly skimping on necessary line items like savings.  

The difference between the CFPB and me is that I wouldn't mandate it; I don't like rules that make some people worse off, in order to protect still other people from themselves. But this sort of paternalism has strong support in a lot of the wonkosphere, most notably from Elizabeth Warren, the intellectual progenitor of this agency. They have clearly embraced financial paternalism as a core part of their mission. And this rule reflects that emphasis.

Here we see the other major category of McArdle's skill set, concern trolling. McArdle thinks accusing liberals of paternalism will give conservatives the opportunity to shout down liberals with accusations of hypocrisy, who will be immobilized by their white liberal guilt and unable to fight back.

So at long last, we have the Considering Elizabeth Warren, The Scholar Part II: The Paternalisming takedown! True, McArdle was so wary of stirring up another hornet's nest of embarrassment that she did not mention Warren by name until the last paragraph and the Warren part of the takedown is a few sentences, not the earthshaking event we were expecting, but beggars must not be choosers.

Although I'm kind of worried about her book. Going by the Warren example, the essence of it will fit inside a Twitter.

The Latest Moral Crusade of Andrew Sullivan

Chronic failure Andrew Sullivan is incensed that Jodie Foster did not publicly fight for gay rights, instead trying to preserve a little privacy throughout the length of her extremely public life.

I'm thrilled Foster can now live a fuller life with less fear. I'm saddened she waited until others far less powerful had made the sacrifice to make that possible. And that she waited for the safest moment of all - winning a well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award - to do so.

Sullivan is not just an activist for gay rights, he's also an activist for white people seeking to prove the genetic inferiority of blacks. But he's furious that Foster brought her friend Mel Gibson to the event.

Her date last night, believe it or not, was wife-abusing, homophobic anti-Semite, Mel Gibson. Would you entrust your young sons to a man with Gibson's violent and vile history?

Mel Gibson, at least, has a reason for being a bigoted nut; he was cruelly and thoroughly brainwashed by a bigoted, nutty ultra-Catholic father. (The linked post is extremely good.) Gibson is the inevitable product of his grossly authoritarian upbringing but Foster, a highly respected figure, is his friend anyway. There is probably a little more to him than his demons.

But what is Andrew Sullivan's excuse for his own demons, that set him to persecute his political enemies in the tradition of the very worst anti-Semites and homophobes? Watching Sullivan rack up page hits by trashing yet another woman he deems "narcissistic" and "self-loving" is nothing new but it seems that many people never tire of Sullivan's man-of-the-world-man-of-the-people shtick.

Sullivan quotes Foster saying:

I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago, back in the Stone Age, in those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family, co-workers, and then gradually, proudly, to everyone who knew her, to everyone she actually met. But now, apparently, I’m told that every celebrity is expected to honor the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance, and a prime-time reality show.
 

Bizarrely, Sullivan ignores Foster's statement that she came out publicly to the people in her life, the only people with whom she felt that she should share the information.

What unadulterated bullshit. She never came out until, very obliquely, in 2007.

Sullivan's public is not Foster's public. Sullivan wants as much attention as possible and built a career based on  forcing the public to accept the legitimacy of a gay Catholic Tory/Republican. He is driven by his demons to gain public recognition and admiration, in which he finds personal validation. Foster has lived in the public eye all her life. And of course she does not mention it but her early adulthood was spent in an especially and  horribly conspicuous public circus, when John Hinkley Jr. shot Ronald Reagan to impress her. 

[S]eriously, if you had been a public figure from the time that you were a toddler, if you’d had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, then, maybe, then you too would value privacy against all else. Privacy. Some day, in the future, people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was. I have given everything up there, from the time that I was 3 years old. That’s reality show enough, don’t you think?
 

 Foster was probably referring to the loss of privacy in our crowded and security-minded world as well as her own media-saturated life but Sullivan unaccountably assumes she is talking about his own predominate concerns.

 "How beautiful it once was"? When gay people were put in jail, or mental institutions, or thrown out of their families - all because of the "beauty" of privacy for Hollywood royalty like Foster?

Foster was born in 1962. It's more than a little unfair to blame her for events that were already changing when she was a little girl. It is especially unfair to blame Hollywood for public persecution of gays. Rock Hudson was not obligated to ruin his career so Andrew Sullivan wouldn't have to deal with the homophobes in his own party.

When someone defends Foster's desire to live her life on her own terms Sullivan just hand-waves the issue away.

Yes, yes, yes. But the only way we were ever going to get past that oppression was through it. I'm thrilled Foster can now live a fuller life with less fear. I'm saddened she waited until others far less powerful had made the sacrifice to make that possible. And that she waited for the safest moment of all - winning a well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award - to do so.

There is something very familiar about such a complaint. Oh, I know. Andrew Sullivan now lives a richer, fuller life with less fear because soldiers far less powerful than he make the sacrifice of their lives and limbs to feed his career. Andrew Sullivan is evidently hoping that Jodie Foster will do the same.

 

Sex And The Libertarian Male

It seems there has been a debate recently in LibertarianLand regarding the male/female ratio of the libertarian population. One participant was Sweet Young Thing Julie Borowski, as mentioned in the comments to an earlier post (thanks, anon!), an ambitious young libertarian who has supped delicately at the Koch teat for some time, finally ending up at the Koch-supported Freedomworks.

(As we all know, Freedomworks is a grassroots-activism-for-hire company, providing a populist veneer to plutocrat activities. Since Ms. Borowski is a university graduate (with honors!), she presumably understands the nature of her job but her enthusiasm for the specialness of her political group sees to carry her past this little road bump in her idealism's path.)

Borowski told her viewers that few women are libertarians because women are passive and submissive. Sarah Skwire and Steve Horwitz responded at Bleeding Heart Libertarians (no, I've never head of it either), taking Borowski to task for her sexist attack on other libertarian women. Obviously Borowski is accustomed to working at the shallow end of the intellectual and moral pool (after all, P. Suderman, boy rat-f*cker, used to work at Freedomworks). She did not realize that demeaning women, a time-honored conservative path to wealth and power, does not work as well with libertarian women, who consider themselves above conservative sexual mores.

But Megan McArdle, whose never misses a chance to extol her own virtues and rhapsodize about her domestic bliss, immediately made the controversy All About Megan.

The Problem With Libertarian Women is Not Libertarian Men

They're great relationship material

A few days ago, Sarah Skwire and Steve Horwitz penned a thoughtful essay on why there are so few women libertarians. This has triggered some natural chaffing, most recently from my colleague, David Frum:

"[Maybe the best answer to why women reject libertarianism is that so many women feel they already spend enough time with toddlers."]  

Mr Frum is treading well-worn ground here. Six months ago Ann Friedman somehow persuaded New York Magazine to publish a piece titled "Paul Ryan is Your Annoying Libertarian Ex-Boyfriend" which checked off every trope. Libertarian guys are totally selfish, because--Ayn Rand! And sexist! And they don't use birth control! 

. . . er, what? Friedman appears to have taken her notions about libertarians from a Very Special Episode of Sex in the City rather than, from, say, observing actual libertarians. And this particular stereotype doesn't make any sense: if libertarian men really were as selfish as she suggests, wouldn't they be maniacal about protecting themselves from unwanted, time-and-money-sucking children?

McArdle's low reading comprehension level often leads her astray, the poor little addle-headed thing. This is what Friedman actually said:

In the dating world, an infatuation with Ayn Rand is a red flag. You might not see it right away: Your date is probably conventionally attractive, decidedly wealthy, and doesn’t really talk politics. But then you get back to his apartment, set your bag down on his glass-topped coffee table, give his bookshelf the once-over — and find it lined with Ayn Rand....  

[T]hat dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged tells you everything you need to know. He sees himself as an objective iconoclast. He's unapologetically selfish, because it's only rational, he says. Sure, he grew up with money but he worked to get where he is today. He’s all about individual responsibility but he just isn’t, metaphorically, into wearing protection.  

This is the part where you collect your shoes and bag and GTFO.

Not that we blame McArdle for her confusion. True, Friedman didn't just use a condom metaphor, she actually pointed out she was using sexual protection as a metaphor by writing the word "metaphorically," but Megan McArdle is on a mission. Like Miss Borowski, McArdle wants to be cool and if she can't be cool by actually doing cool things, she'll be cool by telling everyone at great length and with fervent enthusiasm that she is really, really cool, and of course so is the male of her species.

This touches on something I said in the comments of my previous post:

They are libertarians because they want to be cool. That is, they want to be free of authoritarian control. They rant about the same thing as social conservatives because they are reflexively anti-liberal but unlike conservatives they see no reason why they should publicly conform to tribal boundaries.

They think they are leaders because they flaunt tribal rules but making up a fictional political class to legitimize your tribal transgressions is hopelessly authoritarian. They want to make their own rules, follow their own moral code, create their own art, gain power and influence through their own political action but they can't.

The rules, morals, art (propaganda), power and influence on their side is controlled by the wealthy, for the wealthy's very own benefit. This is why the followers chose that side to begin with; it was the side of the rich and powerful and they hoped to benefit from their proximity to all that money, safety, acceptance, admiration.

But being a follower means that their art, politics, entertainment, and religion must be tailored to help the leaders, not the followers. They have broken free of the followers' rules but they will never be able to break away from their leaders' rules, unless they were to abjure their position in the group.

They don't understand--they never understood--that they don't make the rules, they just enforce them.

So Julie Borowski wants libertarians to hurry up and gain power over the dominant liberal culture by creating libertarian culture, which will somehow immediately become popular. More Dennis Millers and Judd Aaptows and Atlas Shrugged!

But "art" is the creation of a connection from the artist to the viewer. The artist attempts to express his own emotional/intellectual life through his work and the viewer interprets the work through his own emotional/intellectual prism. Art tells us who we were, who we are, who we can be. Propaganda tells us who or what we must be, for the benefit of the propagandist. And it will never be cool.
 

The right longs to be cool because they long to feel special, to both belong to a group and be admired by everyone out of the group. Being cool is the only way they can think of to distinguish themselves from the rest of the conservative followers and defeat their hip liberal enemies. As McArdle says, it's not like they are really trying to govern anyway.

So perhaps it's useful to offer the perspective of someone who's observed the species in its native habitat. Unlike Friedman (and I presume, Frum), I have dated a bunch of libertarian guys . . . and a bunch of liberal guys . . . and a few social conservatives for good measure. And I'm here to report that libertarians make terrific relationship material.

To be sure, I am the first to admit that libertarians are . . . quirky. Asperger's is definitely overrepresented in the community, and with it, various nerdy obsessions. Spend a bunch of time around libertarian guys and you're apt to learn a lot about music, and comic books, and action movies, and computer programming . . . a lot. He could lend you a book, if you want. And he'd be really happy to sit down and spend four or five hours explaining college football statistics to you. Do you want that alphabetically, or north to south?

 I am reminded of something else Friedman said in her post:

As GQ’s Marin Cogan points out, Romney has a tendency to mansplain — informing listeners, in great detail, about mundane things with which they are already familiar.
 

Libertarian men, McArdle tells us, are not just intelligent; they are also good people.

What libertarian guys are not, in my experience, is selfish cads. Full disclosure: I am biased. Some of my best friends are libertarian men, and I even married one. Nonetheless, I'd like to issue a memo to pundits: the personal is not political.  

"The personal is not political."  Those are pretty strange words coming from a woman. Political decisions affect our personal lives every day in fundamental ways. Political decisions gave us the ability to control our own lives legally and physically. Perhaps McArdle is thinking that people make political decisions for ideological reasons, which fits her previous statements. She says she does not understand why people disagree vehemently about politics. Why do they get angry or refuse to come to agreement or make unpleasant accusations of heartlessness and moral degeneracy? It's not personal, after all! From an article on the phrase:

[Carol Hanisch's] essay "The Personal Is Political" said that coming to a personal realization of how "grim" the situation was for women was as important as doing political "action" such as protests. Hanisch noted that "political" refers to any power relationships, not just those of government or elected officials.

But McArdle is an authoritarian and does not want to change the current power structure, which pays her a lot of money to churn out propaganda. Therefore she denies that the personal is political to serve her personal needs.

Even if we accept the absurd notion that it is the blackest sort of selfishness to oppose taxing away someone else's money in order to give it to a third party, that belief wouldn't tell you anything about their personal behavior. Some of the greatest humanitarians in history have been some of the worst husbands, friends, and fathers.
 

Yes it would, because only a selfish rat would want to enjoy all the benefits of modern, expensive society without paying for them, or attempt to ensure that only the wealthy benefit from taxes.  Selfish people are also selfish to their loved ones.

My personal empirical research indicates that in fact, libertarians make great boyfriends and husbands (though my sample size on the latter is pretty small). The ones I've dated have actually been super considerate, and very concerned with pulling their own weight, though I couldn't say whether this is random chance, or the natural outgrowth of a value system that emphasizes voluntary, mutually beneficial cooperation. I will say that it is unusually easy to divide chores with someone who favors simple, rules-based systems for cooperation.

Bullshit. Libertarianism is "the natural outgrowth of a value system that emphasizes voluntary, mutually beneficial cooperation" only in her dreams. Perhaps she meant "voluntary, personally beneficial exploitation" instead but mis-typed. One can only imagine how tedious it is to constantly have to negotiate terms with a libertarian partner who must be convinced that he is not being taken advantage of by a moocher spouse.

On a personal level, it seems that there is no power conflict in her marriage, which is a wonder under the circumstances. McArdle is almost ten years older than P. Suderman, is better and more prestigiously educated, almost certainly makes more money, has a more-prominent social and professional profile, and enjoys a very high degree of confidence in her own abilities. It is impossible for a perfect balance of power to exist in a marriage without constant and conscious effort on the part of both partners.

But that is libertarians for you, a mighty and egalitarian folk who, despite their beliefs that some people are simply better than others and all those better people just happen to be rich, are only too willing to pull their own weight. For instance, when P. Suderman was creating fake grassroots websites to fool the rubes into supporting bank bailouts he was merely being self-sufficient. By supporting the rich he was actually supporting himself, and who could argue with such rugged individualism?

Libertarians are also surprisingly good at romantic surprises. They are usually what Adam Smith called a "Man of System": they love sitting around by the hour, constructing elaborate systems for solving every problem. Which means that they do a smash-up job of planning that extra special, over-the-top anniversary or birthday extravaganza. Virtually all of the best gifts I've ever gotten have come from libertarian guys.

And we all know how important getting gifts is to Megan McArdle.

Of course, I have also dated lovely liberals and considerate conservatives. In fact, while I've had generally great experiences with libertarian men, I can't say I detect much of a correlation between political views and personal qualities: the worst louse I ever dated was a bleeding-heart liberal, as were some of the nicest, most upstanding fellows. Choosing a mate by political label is like choosing food by the picture on the box.

So while McArdle has just written a post saying that libertarian men are great because they abide by  libertarian ideology in their personal lives, ideology really doesn't matter after all.

So no, the lack of libertarian ladies is not due to the inadequacy of libertarian guys. I have some theories as to what might be behind it . . . but I'm afraid that at the moment, I have to go make a non-ideological dinner for myself and my husband.

Evidently P. Suderman lost the negotiation over who would do the cooking.

We eagerly await McArdle's article on why so few women are libertarian when libertarian men are such swell and egalitarian guys.

Freedom Is Obedience

Only through perfect obedience will you achieve freedom. Freedom from the terrible burden of free will, which means we are responsible for our choices and the consequences of those choices. Freedom from self-doubt, from the fear of failure. Freedom from loneliness, as you join others seeking the same nirvana. God promises eternal life, God is the superhero buddy that's always on your side, God's love will take away fear and pain and give you perfect happiness.

For K-Lo, it's a no-brainer. (Literally.) The only kind of freedom she wants is the freedom to give away her rights as an individual and take away the individual rights of others for their own good. For authoritarians, just as goodness is obedience, freedom is obedience. If God gives us liberty we will never truly be free because our freedom depends on the indulgence of God. But K-Lo, bless her heart, never sees the contradiction in her words. If God gave us free will he wants us to have the right to make our own choices instead of being forced to obey him.

But in K-Lo's interpretation of her religion, our only purpose in life is to worship God by demonstrating absolute obedience to his will. Therefore anything that interferes with absolute obedience is abridging her freedom to be obeisant to her god. It is impossible to find common ground politically with such a person because they feel they are standing on consecrated ground and you are trying to drag them to hell.   

For Your Viewing Pleasure

How Not To Stop A Shooter, a comic by Matt Bors.

How Terrible Is Megan McArdle?

Despite the fact that I am trying to move beyond being a Megan McArdle-centric blog, that TBogg already wrote a very funny recap of the post in question, and that Charles Pierce wrote a pithy and wonderfully illustrated post* on McArdle as well, there is one thing I would like to point out as well.

 First, let us pause to acknowledge that of all the ways to discuss the economics of Christmas, McArdle chose to examine whether or not she is getting her money's worth when she receives presents from friends and relatives.

How Terrible Is Christmas?

Should we bother giving all those useless gifts?

I am probably not the right person to answer this question: I spend the week with my father, who lives in a cosy little house with a water view, where we eat a lot and have reasonable conversations. During this week, presents are opened, mostly things that the other person actually wants and can use. I have no horror stories to share.  

But in this post I'm specifically addressing a question that is raised by one economist or another almost every year: isn't Christmas a huge waste? All those presents that no one wants represent huge deadweight loss. Wouldn't well all do better by giving cash, or skipping the process entirely?

Naturally, when McArdle discusses people who get crummy presents she does not include herself. Her family visits evidently are small, quiet, reasonable, and lucrative. No visits to Mom and Dad in her childhood home; her parents are evidently divorced and her father has moved to the seaside. No raucous get-togethers with hoards of relatives, grandparents, cousins and uncles and aunts, with little kids chasing each other around the house and toddlers playing with the wrapping paper and boxes. No loud and laughing reminiscences of childhood pranks or amicable bickering over adult differences of opinions. It's all terribly cosmopolitan.

This seems like a silly question in a world of wishlists--I got the exact martini glasses I wanted, the exact electric pressure cooker I wanted, and the exact 13-inch cast iron skillet I wanted, because people could go right on my Amazon wish list and identify them. And yet, I still had the surprise and thrill of opening gifts (well, okay, I knew what the skillet was before I opened it), because there were a number of things on my list. As far as I know, this experience was shared by everyone else around the McArdle hearth. And by millions of other families in the United States.

McArdle's relatives know better than to wing it when it comes to gift-giving.

I'm reading David Graeber's book, Debt, and while I'm aware of the problems, I do think he gets one thing really right: his exploration of money as a substitute for strong relationships. That is its appealing feature for cosmopolitans, of course; relationships are wonderful in theory, but in practice, they inevitably turn out to be parochial and limiting and an endless amount of work. You do this time consuming task of finding gifts which often aren't right, and then pretending to like and use the wrong things others have gotten you . . . and why bother if you could each buy yourself better stuff? The sociologist and anthropologist answer that the work is the relationship. The only way to have strong social ties is to spend an "inefficient" amount of time and resources investing in them.

Since McArdle just said her family chose to avoid any relationship work by using wishlists for their loved ones, we are left with only one sad conclusion. Nobody wanted to waste any of their time choosing a gift for her. And it is no wonder, for McArdle thinks that relationships are "parochial" (limited in scope or outlook), "limiting" (again), and hard work. Cosmopolitans, like McArdle and her family, would rather just spend money than give time. (Which makes all her donations of time to the IHS rather odd.) But fear not, relatives sometimes are of use after all. McArdle notes that they can sometimes come up with a present that McArdle never even knew she wanted, thereby broadening her shopping horizons. Let's let McArdle have the last word:

How much is that option value worth? I'd say a lot. Especially if it comes bundled with stronger relationships.

*note the url

Yee Haw!

The Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2012, assembled every year by Batocchio at his blog Vagabond Scholar, is up and if you haven't checked it out yet, there are a lot of good  posts there. Don't miss Batocchio's entry; it's a comprehensive analysis of the types of conservatives that the right has devolved into. (I was especially pleased to see him quote a John Rogers (Leverage) post on conservatives because it was one of the first blog posts I ever read.)

Double Down

A typical kindergarten class, as pictured by Megan McArdle.

Awesome art by Mike Mignola of Hellboy fame, found here.



As my helpful commenters and emailers noted, when confronted with an incredulous and mocking response on her latest stupidity, Megan McArdle inevitably doubles down with more stupidity.

Let's start with comments she made on her original post.

Peyton 1 day ago "encourage people to gang rush shooters," Yep. Those six year olds certainly fell down on the job by not rushing the grown man with the assault weapon. You are one sick bitca.

I always enjoy a Joss Whedon shout-out.

Man-who-asks-inconvenient-questions 1 day ago @Peyton 

It takes a village, don't you know?

Heh.

Gorbud 1 day ago @Peyton Thanks keep pushing that lie. It helps you avoid any reasonable response to the story. She NEVER stated that these kids could have or should have rushed anyone. People like you usually pick out something and twist it into a lie just to discredit another person. Really what is wrong with you can't you read. Or does the reality of the government's and your own impotence in the face of evil you can't wish away cause some kind of breakdown in a logical thought process? Obama's magic wand won't work on this problem. The government can't in-fact solve everyone of the world's problems. Big news for the Liberal world. Impossible to accept.

Wishful thinking becomes reality to this poor self-deluded person. McArdle is a master at giving her audience just enough wiggle room to claim that she is not as stupid or venal as she appears. McArdle did not say kindergartners should have rushed the gunmen. She said "young people" should rush gunmen. Now she can claim she meant older kids, which is still indefensible but a little less laughable. Normal human beings would not want any "young people" rushing gunmen ever. They would want their kids and their kids' friends and classmates to run and hide and survive. But Megan McArdle is no longer a normal person. She sold her soul to the devil in exchange for a sous vide machine.

PeterBuka 1 day ago @Gorbud @Peyton ''I'd also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.''What part of that is it you do not understand? If a sane person writes a sane article and finishes it off with complete insanity, that tends to reflect poorly on the sane portions of the article. Similar to Churchill being a savior and a racist at the same time. The racist part tends to smudge his good standing.

McArdle's own words condemn her.

MeganJ.McArdle 1 day ago @PeterBuka @Gorbud @Peyton You should read the rest of the article, in which I made fun of the idea that primary schoolers could have rushed Lanza.

Here is her usual claim that her critics did not read what she wrote. It's a pathetic response but less pathetic than her other typical response, that the critic did not understand what she wrote. And it sets up the lie in the rest of the sentence.

Do you want to know why Megan McArdle is rich and you aren't? Because Megan McArdle is a liar and you aren't. McArdle routinely lies, giant, honking, bald-faced lies, for a wide variety of reasons. Money, of course. Heh! Naturally she lies for money, because she can. There is nothing to stop her. She's not afraid of losing jobs or income; she knows she can always find someone who needs liars to peddle propaganda for them. She's not afraid of social ostracism; her friends, colleagues, and relatives obviously do not find her actions to be morally repellent either. If they did they kept quiet about it, for reasons of their own. So McArdle lies for money when she finds it furthers her ideological goals.

But there is much more to McArdle than greed, of course. There is also vanity, and McArdle lies to save face. This unusually wide-spread public humiliation threatens McArdle's carefully crafted and cultivated high opinion of herself. Prep school scarred her life, evidently. She went to very high prestige schools that most people worked extremely hard to enter. McArdle went to school with lot of very intelligent people over the years (as well as many idle upper class kids like herself). And let's face it, the poor dear just isn't very bright. It had to have been humiliating to be surrounded by people who could actually understand what the professor was saying and could say something intelligent in response. McArdle must be wise, witty, intellectual at all times and the only way she can achieve that goal is by lying, so she lies.

raskolnikovx9 1 day ago 

@MeganJ.McArdle @PeterBuka @Gorbud @Peyton No, but Megan you wrote the above statement and you did it in earnest. Care to retract and apologize? Because, beyond being so very stupid, its very, very offensive. Merl Lino 1 day ago @MeganJ.McArdle @PeterBuka @Gorbud @Peyton You didn't make fun of it you said you didn't know if it would work. You you say that about everything. Please explain what the words, "I would like to see." mean. You don't say that about everything else proposed. Don't wriggle. Admit you proposed something that is terribly wrong and for some unaccountable reason didn't realize that the instant your wrote it.  

Icewaterchrist 1 day ago 

@MeganJ.McArdle @PeterBuka @Gorbud @Peyton please quote that then, because I can't find it anywhere in your article.

She did not, because she could not.

People are very tempted to ignore lies because we all lie at times. We do not, however, make a career out of it. McArdle followed her first post with a couple more. In her next post on the shooting McArdle helpfully pointed out that "I was talking about teenagers, not first graders," not knowing that any parent would be just as appalled at the thought of their 14-year-old daughter rushing a man with an assault rifle.  McArdle explained that it's possible for adults to rush a gunman under some circumstances, although she did not explain why she gave that option as a response to yet another mass shooting of small children.

What often happens in these sorts of attacks is that people run and hide. Split up into ones and twos, they are easy targets for the shooters, who find it easy to pick off cowering people one by one. Unless the shooter's weapon is temporarily disabled--as seems to have happened with Loughner--one or two people are unlikely to be a match for a rifle or a handgun. But it seems to me that 8-12 people could be. Not an automatic weapon, of course, but automatic weapons are not usually used in these attacks, because it's been illegal to manufacture or sell more of these guns for civilian use since 1986. A semi-automatic weapon takes time to aim and fire, and hitting a moving target with a fatal shot is harder than hitting someone who is hiding under a desk.

Please remember that Megan McArdle is hair-splitting the death of children to prevent anyone from passing gun control laws. She has several other reasons why nobody can do anything ever, but let's skip to the end.

Obviously, it is beyond horrible to suggest that even a small number of attacks are largely unavoidable. I don't like saying it. Unfortunately, I think it's true. Which means that it's worth thinking about whether there is something--anything--that people in that situation could do to make them less fatal.

We can't stop random murders so we should not try to control gun sales, but we should try anything up to and including forcing all our teenagers to take SWAT training so they can run towards a man firing a semi-automatic weapon at them. But is McArdle really a liar if she was careful to avoid saying that small children should rush a gunman? Maybe her critics are being unfair by accusing her of wanting to put kids in mortal danger. Fortunately McArdle clears up this dilemma by lying once more about her response.

Merl Lino 1 day ago 

"But I was talking about teenagers, not first graders." You said in a reply to a comment that you meant it as a (very bad) joke. Now your make a different excuse, possibly because you also said you wanted to encourage it unlike other proposals you deem ineffective. Those you wanted to discourage and not recommend. You new response doesn't hold water. The human shield response is not a good one, and training teenagers to do it is absurd. You just reinforce the fact that you are totally without common sense.  

MeganJ.McArdle 20 hours ago 

@Merl Lino I didn't say that. You misread me.

Bingo!

Merl Lino 14 hours ago 

|I covered this, wyour wrote "MeganJ.McArdle 2 hours ago@PeterBuka @Gorbud @Peyton You should read the rest of the article, in which I made fun of the idea that primary schoolers could have rushed Lanza." I replied: "But she wrote, "I'd also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly,.." In the rest of the article she expressed doubt that regulations would be effective, but didn't say she would "like to see them encouraged." She just can't seem to admit that her proposal is terribly wrong or explain why she did not realize that instantly as she wrote it." ----- Can you explain the fact that in the part I quoted you said you'd like to encourage human shield tactics even though you had doubts it would work, but you try to discourage regulations of guns which you also think might not work? Encourage...one set of proposals but discourage the other though you have doubts either of them will work? Then in your first response to that idea you said you were "making fun" of that suggestion? Now you say you were trying to encourage young people, not little kids? So then it was not you making fun, it was you trying to encourage teenagers--you now say--you wanted to gang up .Instead of retracting the suggestion you now elaborate it into a training program for teenagers to learn to react as human shields. You should just admit that it is a preposterous suggestion that you would like to retract.

She can't. She's trapped, by her ego and her lies. She deserves every bit of her humiliation.

The Princess And The Pea Brain

It's all just a game.


This is what sounds smart to a dumb person. For the real problem with Megan McArdle is not her utter lack of empathy for anyone outside of her immediate circle, her mystification at the idea of journalistic ethics, or her vacuous worship of consumerism and all the rilly nice people who provide her with new kitchen gadgets. It's her intellectual capacity. She's dumb. She has the brain the size of a pea. She doesn't have two brain cells to rub together and she would probably end up setting herself on fire if she tried.

But she's dumb in a very special way. McArdle repeats what smarter people say, pretending that she was able to reason out the issue as well. She links to intellectual-looking resources but those works contradict or do not support what she claims. She examines every aspect of the situation in excruciating length, substituting verbiage for analysis. But the words are all empty; meaningless pseudo-intellectual garbage. There is no supporting evidence, no analysis, no chain of argument. There is nothing but a not-very-clever woman who thinks she is being smart, sophisticated and an intellectual leader when she says that children should rush a gunman who is opening fire on them.

Why make such a stupid statement? Because she is stupid. McArdle does not like the idea of gun control because she does not like the idea of people telling her what to do.

I wasn't going to buy a gun, because, hey, what would I do with it? But the chicken guano rules that DC is imposing make me want to buy a handgun just to annoy the twopenny tyrants who thought them up:

[snipped quote]

May I really carry it inside my home without a license, just as if I were a free citizen in a country that respects individual liberty? I am overcome with gratitude, really overwhelmed with the state's generosity . . . permission to cry, sir?

Stupid people do not realize that they are making knee-jerk, adolescent decisions based on a disproportionate sense of self-importance, spite, and greedy anticipation of grabbing everything they want (or might want some time in the future) before anyone else can take it away or keep it for themselves. Stupid people think they are following their ideology to its logical conclusion. They ignore common sense, logic, reason, and empathy because they they have an ax to grind.

Stupid people are also superstitious. The larger framing of McArdle's stupidity is the belief in a universal struggle between good and evil.

Trying to climb this mountain of wickedness is like trying to climb a glass wall with your bare hands. What happened there is pure evil, and evil, unlike common badness, gives an ordinary mind no foothold.

And:

But I doubt we're going to tell people to gang rush mass shooters, because that would involve admitting that there is no mental health service or "reasonable gun control" which is going to prevent all of these attacks. Which is to say, admitting that we have no box big enough to completely contain evil.

Believing in evil is very convenient and satisfying. People are either good or bad. Good people almost always do good things (we are Fallen, after all) and bad people always do bad things. Therefore if anyone that McArdle considers good--corporate CEOs, titans of industry, hedge fund managers--does something bad, McArdle is easily able to deny that those bad actions ever occurred. If McArdle does not like the idea of gun control she can choose to believe that bad people are born that way and there is nothing anyone can do to stop their bad actions. Whether or not McArdle actually believes this is immaterial. Many people unconsciously choose to pretend that they believe in something if it is to their advantage.

The normal reaction to the mass shooting of a bunch of small children is horror and grief, in varying degrees of course. But McArdle does not want to be horrified because she is wrestling with even stronger emotions, her allegiances to those who ally with the gun lobby. McArdle doesn't care about guns much herself and certainly is not happy to see them used to kill kids. But McArdle is a libertarian married to another libertarian, Peter Suderman, who works for Reason, which has a long history of fighting gun control. She does not like to see her views and the views of people like her under attack. So she decides that gun control just wouldn't work, and in her infinite wisdom she shares all the reasons with us little people on her blog.

Most of her reasons consist of saying that nothing can be done to stop someone who wants to shoot people. They will carry out their plans no matter what they circumstances. That might be true but McArdle does not think that it would be any use to try to stop them. Mental health facilities? They already exist, so nothing more need be done. More gun laws? Gun laws already exist, so more will fail. Less lethal guns? They'll just use more guns instead. She has an excuse for everything to insure the nation is inactive in the face of mass shootings. But her excuses are based on willful denial, the refusal to feel any horror at the strange fruits of our gun culture so she can continue to ally herself with libertarians and conservatives. In McArdle's tribal thinking, libertarians are for guns and liberals are against guns, and McArdle finds it extremely gratifying to imagine her side is winning an argument against the side of her enemies.

Conservatives who argue that a total ban wouldn't lower the homicide rate are being ridiculous.   

America would still have a higher homicide rate than anywhere else, because for whatever reason, America is an incredibly violent place.
 

America has more guns than many other countries and America has many more deaths because of all those guns, but she cannot figure out why America is such a violent place. Bullshit. Of course she can. She just does not want to, and her willful ignorance makes her stupid.

But I think there's no question that our homicide rate would be lower than it is now, simply because fewer killings would succeed.

Nor am I going to go through the various cost-benefit reasons that we might want to allow guns, such as defensive uses. I find some of these arguments compelling, others less so. I will say that liberals who argue that defensive uses never save lives are being just as ridiculous as conservatives who claim that guns don't increase the death rate. We don't know the number of defensive uses, but we do know that they happen, because there are many well-documented cases. 

But now is not a good time to have a cost-benefit discussion, and there may never be a good time. The two sides are too far apart: gun control is mostly advocated by people who do not own guns, or want to own guns, and for them it is therefore a zero cost policy. Maybe a negative cost policy, because--apart from the violence--they have a fairly intense cultural antipathy for people who spend a lot of time playing with guns. Randall Collins notes that "US surveys indicate the favorite TV shows of liberal Democrats are comedians satirizing conservatives; conservatives' favorites are college football." However right they may be, those people are not in a good position to persuade gun owners that they shouldn't want to own guns, or that having them taken away is a negligible cost in the bigger picture. Nor have gun owners had any better luck explaining to the other side why they might want to own guns even though some people abuse them.
 

So I'll merely point out what Jeffrey Goldberg has already said, better and at greater length, in The Atlantic: the discussion is moot. You can't ban guns. That ship has sailed.
 

It seems strawmen, not diamonds, are a girl's best friend.  They enable McArdle to indulge in her favorite activity: pretending to be an intellectual Big Thinker dispensing her wisdom to the less elite. Nuance is ignored so Miss Megan can play Pretty Pretty Princess, earning her plastic jewels hard-earned pay as a reward for her specialness. All liberals hate guns, for whatever reason, so of course they want to ban all guns. It's in their culture, which mindlessly controls their every move. Meanwhile conservatives, for whatever reason, "spend a lot of time playing with guns." It's in their culture, evidently, to covet gun ownership. So gun control is impossible, just as caring for the mentally ill is impossible and public safety is impossible and everything else that Megan McArdle considers liberal is impossible.

But one thing, perhaps is possible. It is conservative and libertarian to unload all of the burdens of society on the individual, so Megan McArdle says that it should be individuals who stop mass shootings. It sounds perfectly logical to her!

My guess is that we're going to get a law anyway, and my hope is that it will consist of small measures that might have some tiny actual effect, like restrictions on magazine capacity. I'd also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once. Would it work? Would people do it? I have no idea; all I can say is that both these things would be more effective than banning rifles with pistol grips.

Yes, Megan McArdle just said that the "young people" should  rush the gunman or men and take them down. Because only a fucking moron would say that kindergartners should be trained assassins, McArdle fudges the issue a little but the point is not gun control or little kids' lives or the mental health of our nation. The point is that Megan McArdle is right and all those stoopid liberals are wrong. How does she know this? A rich lady is paying her a ton of money to give such opinions. She has to be right.

And what is the agonizing tragedy of little children's death next to Megan McArdle's need to stroke her own ego and revel in her own specialness?

 

For God And Douthat

I am sorry about the lack of posting; all my spare time is taken up re-learning algebra, cleaning and getting organized for holiday parties, and holiday baking. It seems the Algebra Gods are cruel; if you don't learn it the first, second, or third time, you will end up having to re-learn algebra to teach it to your kids. I have not posted for weeks but I can now graph an equation three different ways.

Meanwhile, Ross Douthat is putting his big forehead to use by dreaming up fun ways to eliminate Social Security via the payroll tax.  His two recent posts on the matter reveal his fundamental, very un-Christian disregard for anyone without a six-figure income and extensive benefits. Douthat doesn't try very hard to convince others of his cute little idea; he didn't get where he is today by thinking and he obviously sees no reason why he should start now.

But before we dive into the dry matter of taxes and Douthat's continuing effort to give his masters a minimum of value for their inexplicably generous pay, let us detour to the Douthat corner of SexyTown, population of one. TBogg has already covered Douthat's musings on how to get Americans to take one for the team by bearing more children then foreigners because civilization demands it but such a fascinating subject demands more examination.

The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.

This charming passage is an excellent example of the incoherence of Douthat's supposed philosophy. He wants to cut the payroll tax to give people more money now while saying that people are supposed to sacrifice their current financial well-being for the sake of the needs of future populations. If we are not supposed to put aside money for our own use in the future via Social Security, why on earth would we choose to spend thousands of more money now by having more children? How selfish can Douthat be?

Three thousand for pre-natal care, another three thousand for delivery (in 1990s dollars), hundreds more on clothing, furniture, bedding, diapers, other medical bills. And that's just for the baby. Lost wages, school expenses, extracurricular activity expenses, more clothing, more food, a bigger house, a better neighborhood, a car, insurance, car repairs, gas, entertainment expenses. And God forbid there should be a problem and the parents would have to spend tens of thousands more on doctors, therapies, and drugs.

As we shall soon see, Douthat wants a consumption tax to make up for the trillions lost if the payroll tax is eliminated. That would make having a baby even more onerous. But most of all, as TBogg points out, Douthat himself is not willing to do what he demands of everyone else. Douthat's wife is (gasp!) a working woman and as far as we know she has not stopped working to raise little Salome Jezebel Douthat and pump out many more little Douthats. How decadent! How selfish! How un-Godly! Why do people refuse to embrace innovation by controlling fertility? Why do they insist on standing athwart history yelling Stop! when they could be embracing the future instead? Don't they know that past generations, who had no choice in the matter regarding fertility, sacrificed by having children to build our civilization?

Since we all know that Douthat is a conservative Catholic who would never interfere with God's Plan for his Sacred sperm by refusing to accept God's Gift of a dozen or so children, we are forced to conclude that either Douthat has had sex but once in his life, or that in his ultimate arrogance Douthat has decided that he, not God, should determine how and when his property wife should conceive his children. It's bad enough that Douthat does not have a Bible-based marriage, with multiple wives, concubines, servants and slave girls bearing his progeny. That is, alas, all too common in these decadent modern times. But to refuse to accept God's will! It is enough to make me weep with grief and the fear of God's wrath!

Just look at the cuteness of Mrs. Douthat! How could Ross not want to force her to overbear?

The next time you run into her on the street, you be sure to ask Mrs. Douthat why she's not obeying her husband and popping out more babies for God and Christendom. It's not like our sexuality is a personal matter between ourselves, our partners, and our gods and goddesses. It's a matter of public record and must be discussed at every opportunity, the better to shame and control our neighbors.

You'll Be Sorry

It seems that someone is staying up past his bedtime again and is vewy, vewy, cwoss. Little Master Douthat hitches up his pants, sticks out his fleshy, quivering lower lip, and lets out a steady, high-pitched whine, because all the other kids are being mean to him. At least, that is what he tells The New York Times his Mummy when he runs home to tattle.

 

Winning an election doesn’t just offer the chance to govern the country. It offers a chance to feel morally and intellectually superior to the party you’ve just beaten.

 Sorry, Ross. Thanks to the cluster of f*uck that was the George W. Bush Administration, the right no longer gets to get up on its high horse when it comes to any behavior whatsoever. No matter how hideously liberals might behave (in reality or in Douthat's imagination), the right did it first and did worse. Remember "We have a mandate," Ross? "Elections have consequences"? We sure do, and we are not about to listen to moral scoldings from the morally and intellectually corrupt.

 

This is an inescapable aspect of democratic culture: no matter what reason tells us about the vagaries of politics, something in the American subconscious assumes that the voice of the people really is the voice of God, and that being part of a winning coalition must be a sign that you’re His chosen one as well.

 Perhaps it's the way every US politicians encases each speech in a thick, sickly-sweet, viscous coating of Jello God blesses. God bless the American people, God bless the US, God bless our endeavors, blah blah blah. Evidently God hates foreigners because according to the US he routinely blesses our wars as well.  It's very odd that nobody thanks God when he blessed us with Hurricanes Sandy, Katrina, Ike and Rita, but maybe the drone-blessed Pakistanis are doing that for us while we are cleaning up our mess and burying our dead.

This means the losing coalition must be doomed to wander east of Eden, and liberals have been having a good time with this idea of late. “Those poor, benighted Republicans!” runs the subtext of their postelection commentary. “They can’t read polls! They can’t reach Hispanics! They don’t understand women! They don’t have a team of Silicon Valley sorcerers running their turnout operations!”

 

Actually, they can't, they can't, they can't, and they don't. Pointing out the sad truth is not triumph, it's pointing out the truth. Which is something that many conservatives are doing as well, in the hope that they will come back to power in their lifetimes. Liberals spent months pointing out that the Republicans were fooling themselves but the fools never listened. It's not our fault they're fools, and if some people happen to point and laugh, well, they asked for it didn't they?

 

Back in 2011, the Obama White House earned some mild mockery for its “win the future” slogan. But now that the president has been re-elected, the liberal conventional wisdom is that the Democrats have done just that — that Republicans are now Radio Shack to their Apple store, “The Waltons” to their “Modern Family,” a mediocre Norman Rockwell to their digital-age mosaic.  

Maybe it’s too soon to pierce this cloud of postelection smugness. But in the spirit of friendly correction — or, O.K., maybe curmudgeonly annoyance — let me point out some slightly more unpleasant truths about the future that liberalism seems to be winning.

 

You'll be sorry, oh yes you will, liberals. You think you're so cool and hip and modern when you're really just giant poopy-heads and you'll be very, very sorry when your giant poopy-headedness ruins everything for everybody! Poop!

 

Liberals look at the Obama majority and see a coalition bound together by enlightened values — reason rather than superstition, tolerance rather than bigotry, equality rather than hierarchy. But it’s just as easy to see a coalition created by social disintegration and unified by economic fear.  

Consider the Hispanic vote. Are Democrats winning Hispanics because they put forward a more welcoming face than Republicans do — one more in keeping with America’s tradition of assimilating migrants yearning to breathe free? Yes, up to a point. But they’re also winning recent immigrants because those immigrants often aren’t assimilating successfully — or worse, are assimilating downward, thanks to rising out-of-wedlock birthrates and high dropout rates. The Democratic edge among Hispanics depends heavily on these darker trends: the weaker that families and communities are, the more necessary government support inevitably seems.

You think you're all so smart and nice and friendly but you'll be sorry when all those people you want to help need help! Because Hispanic girls are sluts and have lots of babies and Hispanic boys are stoopid and drop out of school and how can a poor, uneducated Hispanic person get a job? They might end up doing physical labor such as building houses and office buildings or landscaping, or become maids and nannies. And that would be a terrible shock if they degenerated to that point, wouldn't it?
 

Likewise with the growing number of unmarried Americans, especially unmarried women. Yes, social issues like abortion help explain why these voters lean Democratic. But the more important explanation is that single life is generally more insecure and chaotic than married life, and single life with children — which is now commonplace for women under 30 — is almost impossible to navigate without the support the welfare state provides.

And speaking of sluts, what about single women, who sometimes have babies and therefore chaos and insecurity? Do you want to support them too? Because single mothers never marry and never support themselves and are utterly incapable of taking care of their children, forcing good, goodly married men like Ross Douthat to support them instead! If Douthat wanted to support a bunch of children he would have sex, which he won't, so he doesn't have to!

Or consider the secular vote, which has been growing swiftly and tilts heavily toward Democrats. The liberal image of a non-churchgoing American is probably the “spiritual but not religious” seeker, or the bright young atheist reading Richard Dawkins. But the typical unchurched American is just as often an underemployed working-class man, whose secularism is less an intellectual choice than a symptom of his disconnection from community in general.

You know, I think I'm detecting a theme here: jobs. People need jobs to support themselves and their kids. Jobs lead to all sorts of things like order and self-sufficiency and morality. Perhaps we might think about that and maybe even do something to help Americans find those elusive, necessary things. Or we can shame and persecute them instead, the proudly conservative way.

What unites all of these stories is the growing failure of America’s local associations — civic, familial, religious — to foster stability, encourage solidarity and make mobility possible.  

This is a crisis that the Republican Party often badly misunderstands, casting Democratic-leaning voters as lazy moochers or spoiled children seeking “gifts” (as a certain former Republican presidential nominee would have it) rather than recognizing the reality of their economic struggles.  

But if conservatives don’t acknowledge the crisis’s economic component, liberalism often seems indifferent to its deeper social roots. The progressive bias toward the capital-F Future, the old left-wing suspicion of faith and domesticity, the fact that Democrats have benefited politically from these trends — all of this makes it easy for liberals to just celebrate the emerging America, to minimize the costs of disrupted families and hollowed-out communities, and to treat the places where Americans have traditionally found solidarity outside the state (like the churches threatened by the Obama White House’s contraceptive mandate) as irritants or threats.

Little Master Douthat is beginning to blubber, with big, soapy spit-bubbles floating out like in a cartoon. Democrats are never people of faith,  never members of a community, never part of a family. The Democratic way is one of dependence, chaos and immorality, because Douthat says so. All virtue belong to Republicans, except maybe that whole helping your fellow man thing that Jesus kept going on about but that doesn't count because the Bible says God helps those who help themselves. Okay, the Bible doesn't actually say that, but Douthat says that in the book he wrote and just happens to have right here for the low, low price of $13.98, which makes it the next best thing.

This is a great flaw in the liberal vision, because whatever role government plays in prosperity, transfer payments are not a sufficient foundation for middle-class success. It’s not a coincidence that the economic era that many liberals pine for — the great, egalitarian post-World War II boom — was an era that social conservatives remember fondly as well: a time of leaping church attendance, rising marriage rates and birthrates, and widespread civic renewal and engagement.

 

And here is where Douthat depends on the chance that you didn't go to Harvard like him and therefore must never have heard of the New Deal. Nor Social Security and Medicare, which helped older people become self-sufficient and therefore less of a burden on their children, which can only improve family cohesiveness.  Or the GI housing and education bills, which created a large middle class that lived in their own stable neighborhoods.

No such renewal seems to be on the horizon. That isn’t a judgment on the Obama White House, necessarily. But it is a judgment on a certain kind of blithe liberal optimism, and the confidence with which many Democrats assume their newly emerged majority is a sign of progress rather than decline.
 

Boo-hoo, Douthat sobs. Liberals will be sorry they won in the future, when the safety net they fought for is available for the people who need it and power is shared with immigrants, women, and the poor. For when wealthy white males lose power it means civilization is declining, dog and cats are living together, and Ross Douthat might actually have to succeed on his own merits.

God forbid!

Rewards

For political parties and the people who depend on them for a sense of belonging, there will never be a time to challenge, criticize or threaten their leader. From an article at the Huffington Post.

President Barack Obama made a direct, personal appeal to 30,000 of his top campaign activists on Tuesday night, asking them to stay involved in politics and to continue pressuring Republicans during upcoming tax and budget negotiations.

"I'm so proud of what you guys accomplished and I will always be in awe and inspired by what you've done," the president said on the call, which the Huffington Post listened to. "So that's the good news. The bad news is our work can't stop now. Because as we learned in the first term, in some ways an election is just the beginning. It is not the end point. It is a means to a goal and that is to actually help families all across the country."

Note that he does not speak of rewarding them for their hard work; his career successes are their rewards. Leaders believe that followers owe them, they do not owe their followers.

Obama is extremely shrewd and he knows how to manipulate people. His statement that he must cut "entitlements" or the Republicans will do it instead is one example of this and the above statement is another. He wants to keep activists' focus on what Republicans are doing instead of what he is doing.

The president, speaking from a White House phone, cautioned listeners to expect disappointments during his second term. As he has in the past, Obama warned that he was prepared to swallow some bitter pills during the negotiations, including some that would agitate the base.

"As we move forward there are going to be new wrinkles and new frustrations, we can't predict them yet," he said. "We are going to have some triumphs and some successes, but there are going to be some tough days, starting with some of these negotiations around the fiscal cliff that you probably read about, making sure that our tax system is fair. So we are going to need you guys to stay active. We need you to stick with us and stay on this."

What he means, of course, is that he needs the people who helped him get reelected to keep the rest of the Democratic party in line when they are told to accept cuts in the safety net.

But with the sour, he promised some sweets. Obama said that his White House would be more effective at community engagement. He pledged to have his team give more "clear directions and talking points in terms of how we keep mobilizing across the country." He also said that he planned to spend more time outside of the nation's capital during the next four years.

"One of my pledges for a second term is to get out of Washington more often because it is just good for my soul," said Obama.

The "sweets" are not Democratic principles and programs, they are hints that activists will actually be able to see Obama in person. Perhaps even take their picture with him! Who knows? What greater reward for selling out our elderly can one ask?

The president's comments -- the most explicit push yet for campaign volunteers to continue their election-type engagement -- came during a conference call organized by what remains of the Obama campaign. Mitch Stewart, one of Obama's top campaign aides, told listeners they would be outfitted with activist tools for the critical weeks of negotiations ahead. Stewart also revealed that some campaign staffers remained in Obama's Chicago reelection headquarters, crunching data to figure which community activist tools had worked during the election.

"As the president said, our work is not done," said Stewart. "We are never going to stop trying to be better. And there are important lessons to be learned from" the election. "There is an immediate need around the fiscal cliff that people can start to engage on," Stewart said.

Obama's priority is attacking the deficit, a non-existent problem. It is an excuse to cut Democratic programs, which will be immediately used against them by Republicans. After Obama is out of office.

The president's call to the cavalry will be welcome news to Democrats who complained Obama reverted to an inside game during his first term. Equipped with an email list of 13 million activists and more devoted followers, Obama spent much of his first four years trying to move legislation through backroom negotiations.

Of course he did. The activists were no longer necessary so they were shut out of any legislation. Now that they are needed again they are activated again.

Tuesday night's conference call suggests more of a reliance on an outside game approach -- something that the campaign has hinted it would do. In an early November conference call with Democratic-leaning reporters, Jeremy Bird, the president's top grassroots organizer, explained that the campaign was specifically constructed to be "long-lasting."

Here is the game approach they are using:

It will last as long as it is needed and then the backroom negotiations will recommence.